


Rage Against the Dying of the Light

by Jaune_Chat



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5 Times, Action, Anger, BAMF Clint Barton, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Death, Defiance, Gen, Old Age, Poison, Spies & Secret Agents, Trapped, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 14:27:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaune_Chat/pseuds/Jaune_Chat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint Barton will always go down fighting, no matter what.  Five deaths of Hawkeye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rage Against the Dying of the Light

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a [prompt at avengerkink](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/17385.html?thread=39770345#t39770345): Death is my kink, but I have a twist on it. Lots of death scenes are sad, or poignant, or have the character accepting the end. I think that Clint would go down fighting, no matter what. 
> 
> I'd love to see a 5+1, different ways of Clint dying (possible, but not limited to: illness/poison, in battle with the team, trapped behind enemy lines, connected only by comlink, etc.), but always angry/pissed/frustrated that it's ending now or in this way. If you need inspiration, think of Vasquez dying in Aliens. Even as she's hit with the acid, she's so very angry.

**Poison**

What really sucked was the fact that he couldn’t use his bow. Clint had always been proud of the fact that no one else could draw his bow, one made to his precise specifications, suited to his strength, his dedication to his art, his unique talent. And whatever Cuvarro hit him with had robbed him of that, left him pale and sweating and trembling with weakness as the poison coursed through his system, burning and destroying everything in its wake.

The sight of Clint shivering in his bonds had set the man to smirking, his greasy little moustache curving up as he'd gloated over bringing down his "would-be assassin."

"What makes you think you can kill me now?" Cuvarro asked, flicking imaginary flecks of dirt away from his lapels, the rings on his fingers glittering in the light of the tropical sunshine. Those rings, this mansion, the bodyguards outside his door, the little empire he'd built in the jungle, all paid for by fields of coca, carefully sold to fund his little army-for-hire, an army that would fight for anyone with the cash to hire them. Cuvarro didn't ask questions, didn't care, just took the cash and let his cheerful band of killers slaughter and terrorize wherever the whims of paranoid dictators took them, as long as the money ended up in his bank.

That money had led Clint here to cut off the snake's head. Or put an arrow through it.

The fact that he couldn't right now? Sucked.

"I know I can," Clint said, baring his teeth in a defiant grin. He had to gasp out the sentence, and Cuvarro laughed. 

"Whatever government agency spawned you, we will send you back in pieces."

"Send 'em my head first. Let them know I killed you," Clint hissed, his breathing becoming labored, his vision misting. He was not going to fail this, he fucking _refused_ to fail, not this, not now. Anger rose in him, stiffening his spine, giving him a crumb of his old strength.

"Why not?" Cuvarro said, and leaned close, comforted in the fact that Clint was so weak he could barely twitch. "I can be generous to a dead man."

"So can I," Clint whispered, and struck. He took that remaining strength and bit into Cuvarro's lips, crunching his poison tooth at the same time. He breathed out hard and kept his teeth sunk in, breathing the deadly poison into Cuvarro. His vision misted over completely as Cuvarro gasped out his last, flopping on the floor and beginning to curl up in his death throes.

 _Got you, you bastard._ Then the darkness came, and Clint let it in.

\-----  
 **Outnumbered**

He had a hundred arrows in his quiver. One hundred precisely, and he kept careful track of them, numbering his enemies with the same care. One exploding arrow could take out five in a single shot if he did it right, or even more if he used it to take out something that could fall on them. Plain arrows were for precision work, making sure civilians didn’t get hurt. Others were for specific situations – gas arrows for extraction missions, smoke arrows for surprise attacks, signal arrows for coordination, grappling line arrows for infiltration or exfiltration. He knew exactly how many he had of each, and could tally them in his head without bothering to checking the readouts on his bow.

When the buried stasis pod of Chitauri awoke two years after the Battle of New York, Clint knew how many he could kill from his position.

It wouldn’t be enough.

The Avengers had already fought this battle. They’d already _won_ this fight. To have to fight it again filled him with a rage that matched The Hulk’s roar of fury, Thor’s battle cry, and the cursing from Tony, Steve, and Natasha in several different languages. That rage had decimated the Chitauri infiltrators, but it hadn’t stopped them. And it seemed the hive mind they’d shared had given them some memory of what had happened the last time – that Clint had been the one who’d given the others the information to keep them from conquering the city.

They swarmed his perch, and his arrows rained down on them and through them like autumn leaves, leaving blue and green blood in their wake. Twenty arrows gone. Fifty. Seventy five. Ninety. Ninety-eight.

Ninety-nine.

The last arrow would let him swing down from the ledge, jump over them, swing down, get into a window, call for a back-up quiver. But if he did that, they would take their focus off of him and swarm Nat and Steve, who didn’t have the benefit of a wall at their backs, being exposed on the street, fighting back-to-back.

He was an Avenger, and he wouldn’t sacrifice their safety for his own life. The Chitauri had been afraid of him. They should be.

Arrow one hundred pierced the skull of the one leading the charge. Swinging his bow knocked three more from the building ledge before it was wrenched out of his grasp.

Screaming defiance, Clint drew his knives and threw himself into the fray with all the pent-up rage that four dozen agents and ten civilians had died at his hands before he’d faced the Chitauri the first time.

He fought until the blades snapped, the Chitauri shrieking in something like panic as he bull-rushed the last two over the edge, flying for an instant before the unforgiving ground rushed to meet them.

\-----

**Alone**

Natasha was in his ear as the building collapsed.

“God _damn_ it!”

“Clint?”

The pain surged enough to make him faint, but he fought it, clinging to consciousness with all his might.

“Stone landed on my _fucking_ legs,” he said, breathing the dust-and-smoke-laden air with shallow breaths. He could barely see anything, and was grateful for that. He could tell his legs were crushed, that cracked concrete was hemming him in on all sides, that he scarcely had room to breathe, let alone try to escape. The rubble shifted ominously above him, and moving his head meant he could feel it press into his scalp.

“Tony’s on his way. Hold on-.”

“Not gonna happen. It’s settling, Nat.” Clint paused, took a deep breath, and let loose a string of invective in every language he knew. “I’m already dead.” Something shifted slightly, and Clint gasped when he felt pressure starting on his stomach. “Kill ‘em for me, Nat.”

“I won’t forget.”

Clint bared his teeth against the crushing dark. That was Natasha’s greatest gift, for one who couldn’t remember much of her life: memory. Memory and death.

“Kill ‘em,” he repeated.

“Arrows in their eyes, Clint.”

That was the last thing he heard before the rock shifted again.

\-----

**Controlled**

He’d been under someone else’s sway before, and he’d sworn he’d never let it happen again.

When Loki appeared, that was the only thought Clint let into his head. He refused to be used again, to let anyone be hurt by having his priorities forcefully rearranged. He would go down fighting. 

He also wouldn’t let anyone else have to deal with what he’d gone through.

Loki got to him only because Clint let him, because he’d been dreaming about screwing him over for a year, because he’d already heard Loki’s insidious voice whispering in his ear, and he’d gone over and over what he’d do if it ever happened again. He heard the shouts on the coms as blue overtook his vision, as Loki filled up his mind, and smiled in the pure calm anger of revenge served ice cold.

He served Loki. But he served him like the djinn in _Wishmaster_ , twisting every desire Loki wanted into the worst possible interpretation he could think of.

Surrounded by the ruins of his plans, the Avengers closing in, Loki split Clint’s skull like he’d threatened to do. As the scepter sliced through the air to cleave him, Clint gave Loki a death’s head smile, laughing at him inside the last inviolate part of his mind.

\-----

**Age**

There were old thieves, and there were bold thieves, but there were no old, bold thieves. That was how the saying went, and Clint knew there should be no old, bold Avengers either, not with the lives they led.

There was a downside to being so good, to have evaded death so long that you found yourself teaching your successor, joints too creaky and body just too worn out to go swinging from rooftops and battering bad guys with your fists. 

He was breathing too hard, the oxygen mask over his face fogging up, but Clint really couldn’t bring himself to care. Damn it, that he’d survived everything the cosmos could throw at him only to find himself at the end of his rope… He could have gone down a thousand times, on missions in nameless towns, against drug lords or alien menaces, evil geniuses or rogue robots, and now he was going to die in bed.

Clint laughed bitterly, sounding hollow in the mask, and wondered how messed up he was that he wished some punk would try to invade the nursing home so him and the other S.H.I.E.L.D. retirees could kick some ass “RED”-style. He wanted anything than having to just sit here and know that eighty-seven years was probably his limit, knowing his lungs were just tired of expanding and contracting, that his heart was tired of beating.

The nurse strode into the room, smiling nervously at him, and Clint could see her suddenly frown at his chart in her hands. Well then. No time like the present.

“I want my bow,” he said, pulling the mask away long enough to be heard. “Now.”

The nurse had been at this nursing home too long to refuse a request like that. Moments later his bow was in his hands, an arrow with it. His gnarled, arthritic hands, shaky and liver-spotted, closed around the bowstock and string, old callouses finding their places through long practice, even if he hadn’t been able to draw the weapon in years.

Clinton Francis Barton greeted death like a sentry at dawn, eyes clear and open, his weapon in his hands.

\-----

**And One Resurrection**

“You look good for a dead man, Clint,” Natasha said, nudging his shoulder as the tiny crowd around his gravesite watched the weighed coffin being lowered into the ground.

“I hate my tombstone. Didja have to put my middle name on it?” Clint groused.

“That sold it. If you were alive, clearly you would have fought that tooth and nail. Hence, you’re dead.”

“Sure, bring logic into it,” Clint said, and bowed his head, tugging his cap low. 

“When you go and bring down an arms dealer by mowing your way through his entire compound in a way that shocked the Hulk? Then yes, you need to be not alive until things calm down a bit.”

“He pissed me off.”

Natasha’s lips twitched a little and she finally smiled. “And here I thought Tony could be the master of understatement.”

Clint turned and put his arm around her, still sore from fighting, and held her close, just glad to be back with her. “I didn’t feel like dying that day, Nat.”

“You never do.”

“Damn straight.”

Natasha smiled whole-heartedly as they watched the funeral, her hand twined with Clint’s, his living warmth a constant at her side.


End file.
